The muster field held men, women and beasts of all descriptions - all willing to swear their swords into your service. Patchily armoured peasants with pitchforks and little else stood next to the retinues of great knights, their tales already told in the inns and taverns of nearby cities. The master of coins tapped his ledger and shook his head slightly, indicating to you just how many of the assembled multitude the kingdom could afford to hire.

Each race has its own troop types, which each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Hire screen allows you to increase the size of your armies, and also to hire scum to perform black ops such as scouting your enemies or wreaking havoc in their kingdoms. The price of each unit is displayed, as well as how many troops you can afford to hire with your current treasury. It is worth noting that each unit also has an upkeep cost, so even though you may be able to pay the initial fee for those thousand dragons, it may bankrupt your kingdom in the long run. Troops who are not paid due to lack of money will quickly desert to find more reliable nobles to serve.

Although each race has troops with different names, and also different prices, there are always presented in the same order and often referred to as T1, T2, T3, T4 and T5 based on this order. T1 to T4 are your military troops, and are used when calculating the offensive or defensive results of a War attack. T5 is your scum troop, and it is used to calculate the strength of results of a Thievery attack.

Your military troops get progressively more expensive as you move along from T1 to T4, but along with the increase cost to purchase the troops, comes an increase in raw strength. 1:1 T3 or T4 will always be stronger than T1 or T2.

Troop Cap

However, there is a limit to how many troops and fortresses a kingdom can hold, sometimes you may find that you have reached this cap and are told to attempt a smaller purchase if you try to hire more troops. You must either downsize troops or fortresses, or acquire more land in order to continue expanding your army.

Your troop cap is based on the accumulated gold cost of the troops that you have hired. Therefore, even though you stronger T3/T4 troops have a raw 1:1 power that is greater than the raw 1:1 T1/T2 power, it may well be that it is actually better to hire the cheaper troops.

For example:

On a Human kingdom, Pikemen and Knights are both defensive troop types. Pikemen cost 2000 gold and have a raw defence of 40, Knights cost 4500 gold and have a raw defence of 82.5. Now, when comparing these two troop types at a 1:1 ration, the knight would seem the better option when defending.

However, let's imagine for a moment that your kingdom has a troop cap of 10,000,000 gold. That means that you could hire either 5000 Pikemen or 2222 Knights. 5000 Pikemen have a combine defensive score of 200,000, but 2222 Knights have a lower combined defensive score of 183,315

Deciding on the best troops for your kingdom can be even more complicated however, because the raw strengths and troop cap are not the only thing to consider. Training is also important to think about, and the more troops on your kingdom, the more turns you spend training them.

Using the same example kingdom, with an imaginary train rate of 1000, it will take you 20 turns to train all 5000 pikemen to level 5, however, it will only take 9 turns to train up the Knights. As a player, you'd need to decide if having 11 additional turns to spend elsewhere is worth more or less to you, than a 9% reduction in raw defensive power.